Is it possible to be disappointed by a film version of Baywatch? Is that a philosophical valid position to take? Surely with Baywatch the disappointment is built in; the disappointment of knowing that you had nothing better to do with an hour than watch this nonsense show about overblown lifeguards just in the hope of seeing Pamela Anderson's swimsuit jiggling around in slow motion.

The big screen version of what was once the world's favourite TV show is, like most Hollywood versions of TV favourites, an act of affectionate desecration. The script lovingly sends up the silly cliches and tropes of the show, yet cannot hide a meanness of spirit which makes the whole enterprise seem foul.

It's not that I'm some kind of defender of the flame of Baywatch's integrity – I only saw one episode and it was one where the team all had to get fully dressed to do an inland rescue in a forest – but honestly I was disappointed. I thought the cast had promise and the premise of having them take on local drug dealers made a kind of sense. The inherent joke about the show was the improbability derived from having a group of writers trying to make up plots week in, weeks out, year in, year about a bunch of life guards.

Johnson's Mitch Buchannon is a beach guru, surrounded by devoted happy clappy followers. It's an inversion of a sitcom like the Brittas Empire; the deluded comic boss who takes everything too seriously, has shaped the surrounding cast to his view of the world. (This is possibly because his beach is surely the most hazardous stretch of sand this side of the Normandy landings: everybody there owes their life, or that of a relative or friend, to Mitch's heroics.) Efron is the unruly outsider, a disgraced, former Olympic gold medal swimmer who is forced upon the group and is there to point out the absurdity of them trying to take on organised crime.

It could have worked but the humour is ridiculously flimsy, a lethal combination of age old sex jokes and topical references. So, for example, Johnson constantly insults Efron by calling him by the names of boy band members. Some of the jokes must have gone out of date the day after they were made. Baywatch, like other big screen TV adaptations, seems motivated by a fierce anti-nostalgia, that the past is a place populated solely by sad losers who never had 2,000 followers on twitter.

What's most dispiriting about the film is that they've got the smut all wrong. The whole point of the show was the bouncing and the jiggling. It was all so innocently sordid. In 2017, we're all too good for that. Everybody jogs about in diminished clothing, but it is passed off as knowing. Which would be fine, but the film replaces leering smuttiness with some really scummy low brow comedy sequences such as vomiting in pools, trapped erections or playing around with a dead man's dick in a morgue. There's also a fat lad (Jon Bass, filling the Josh Gad role) who is there simple to be made fun of for being fat (and, of course, be a computer whizz, which is the overweight's sole purpose on this earth.) Plus, it just seems wrong to have these characters use the F word quite so much.

The original TV series was a prime piece of American lifestyle propaganda, a celebration of American abundance, rubbing all that sun, all that sand, all that fresh flesh, all that magnificently molded plastic, in the rest of the world's faces. The film pushes that angle even further: the bodies are even more robust, yet they all survive on a diet of burgers and shakes. Baywatch though is a wretched image of the USA, it's them as a spent force, at odds with its history and directionless.

Hollywood makes films of old TV series because they feel they must, because it is known quantity and there is security in that, but once they've got them they have no use for them, they have to destroy them, rubbish them for the sin of not being right now.